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I’ve been in Hyderabad for about 12 years, been married for 9 years. I’ve come with my wife, her name is Jemmy. We’ve got two children, older one Zain, 5 years old, and younger one Evy, 1 year old. We are members of the church at Gachibowli, some of you may be familiar with the church. And we know Dionne Brother and Shwetaka and children for many years and we are really grateful for the friendship that we’ve had with them. And we constantly connect with each other. We hear of the church here. We rejoice in what God is doing. We rejoice in the way God is sustaining you as a church.
We praise God for you and we pray for you. We do remember you in our prayers and we will continue to do so. And it is really a privilege to be with you here today. And as we look into God’s word together, I request you to turn your Bibles to the epistle of John, of 1st John chapter 2 verse 15 to 17.
I speak on occasion in my church and we’ve been walking through the book of 1st John, so this is the passage we looked at last time in my church, so we’ll just look at that here today. 1st John chapter 2 verse 15 to 17, I’ll read it for you.
“Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life is not from the Father, but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” We’ll just pray. Father, we humble ourselves before you as we sit under your word.
Father, please speak to us. Please help us. Give us ears to hear. Give us hearts that are open to receive your word and to align to your will for our lives. Help us, Lord, to see you for who you are. Help us to respond to you rightly. Help us to come under the authority of your word. Please bless our time together, Lord. We pray for the aid of your Spirit, it without whom, Lord, all preaching is in vain. We pray for your help, Lord. Please be in our midst to minister to our hearts. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen. Many years back, I remember I was, uh, I was attending my brother’s wedding and, uh,
there was this incident when I was standing on the stage, uh, taking — you have this thing where you take photos after the wedding. So I was standing with my brother and I think we were taking photos. One cousin of my father, he comes to me, he was a pastor in a church, he comes to me and he comes close to me and he whispers, I mean he whispers his disapproval to me about a goatee that I was having. I was having a goatee that day and he was not very happy with me.
Why I start with this, so the context is just a Pentecostal pastor, so he comes from a certain background. And yeah, he just was unhappy with what I was — the goatee that I had. Why I start with this story is simply to help us think about this fact that when we think about the idea, the this whole thing called worldliness, when we think about worldliness, often there are different perceptions that we all have in our minds. We may carry different ideas and some of it might be influenced by a tradition, the background that we that we have been raised and all of that,
we may all have different definitions, the way that we process this thing called worldliness. Some would say that, say, watching movies is worldliness, going for parties is worldliness, you know, having a certain kind of lifestyle is worldliness, wearing certain kinds of dresses are worldliness. Well, some others would probably say that, you know, we are free, we are Christians, now we are free to live the way we like. We are free in Christ, Christian liberty and all of that, let’s go the whole nine yards. That’s the way some would process this thing called, they were not really, worldliness is not really a consideration to them.
Well, some others would not see worldliness as an issue in their own hearts, but they would really think, okay, all those really immoral people, all those people living those wicked kinds of lifestyles and all of that, that’s worldly people out there, that’s nothing to do with me. Well, there are just these different kinds of ways in which we can process these whole things of worldliness. So there are some who set up external rules of behavior. Our code of conduct is what determines worldliness. Whereas some others would say that worldliness is not a problem for me personally, it’s a problem out there for somebody else.
What does it mean to be worldly is something that we want to consider and our passage today is going to help us with that. We’re going to think about that and why we should not love the world. This message is titled, A Love That God Hates. And I think I got it from John MacArthur’s commentary, if I remember correctly. I found it to be really helpful. I think it really captures the essence of this passage. So I took it and I think it helps us in processing this passage well.
As we look into this passage, we have three points that we will consider today. First is we’re going to look at the command on what John says and what God says about how we are to relate to the world. The second one will be the verdict which tells us what if we are lovers of the world, what is true of our life if we love the world. And the third we will be looking at reasons as to why we should not love the world. We’ll first look at the command that John gives us about not loving the world. John says in 1 John 2:15, “Do not love the world or the things the world.”
This command is important for certain reasons. For starters, it is the first command that appears in the epistle of John. So John is not very heavy on commands, be it in the gospel or be it, I mean, in comparison to other authors. And even in the epistle, he’s not very heavy on commands. So this is the very first command. He’s written like two chapters deep. And now’s when the first command comes in. So it’s something that we want to pay attention to. And he doesn’t have too— So it’s something that we want to pay attention to.
Something else of significance is that when we scan the New Testament, we don’t have, at least in what I could search and see, I don’t think we have other commands where we are asked not to love something. Of course, there are examples of how we should not love something. There are examples of that. But as far as prescriptive teaching goes, as far as explicit commandments go, commands in the New Testament, as far as I could see, to not love something. There are—there’s a whole range of commandments to love, but here’s a commandment that now comes to us that says do not love. And when the
God of love, the God who—John will go on to say that God is love in this epistle—when the God of love tells us to not love something, we want to pay close attention to that. We want to be careful. We want to really listen closely to what is being said. This is a kind of— So one important question that we must raise at this point is, what is this world that John is talking about? What is this world?
And that’s really important to our passage because if you look at the passage, in just three verses, there’s no less than six mentions of the word world. It’s clearly central to what John is telling us here. So, as we read through the New Testament, we will see that the word world is used in a variety of senses. It’s used in so many different ways, having different nuances to the meaning. The word world, actually, it’s a familiar word. In the Greek, it’s a familiar word to us. It’s the word cosmos, which is carried over to English as well. But at its core it really means an ordered system, a well-arranged system and has different ways in which that word is used.
So it’s like a system that is well arranged or ordered. When we look at the New Testament we see that the word cosmos is used for the whole universe that is created, for the whole earth. It could refer to mankind in general, “God so loved the world.”
It could refer to Gentiles, it could refer to Jews and Gentiles together, it could a woman’s adornment. 1 Peter 3:3, the word cosmos is used there to speak of the woman’s arrangement, the way she arranges herself. That’s the sense of the word. It can just be used in a variety of ways. In a negative sense, it can also be used for human beings who are in rebellion against God.
Well, the sense in which John uses it here is really to refer to this world as really a system, something sinister, something evil. A system that is hostile to God. A system that has set itself against God and against his Christ. It is a system that is ordered and is designed and its sole intent, the whole purpose of this system is to oppose God. And it is a rival system or a rival kingdom to God’s kingdom and its ruler is the mightiest of the fallen angels, Satan himself. And this system contains all manner of values or philosophies or ideologies or belief systems that are anti-God and anti-Christ. That’s the kind of system that we are talking about. This is—this is what the world is. And this world, this whole system, it operates at a macro level, be it politics
or media, entertainment, any domain that we think about, education and business, in everything there this world system is at play. It seeks to take control and influence the direction of all these different things. But not just operates at the macro level, it comes down to the micro level, to our very lives, and it seeks to win the allegiance of human beings and keep them from knowing God and loving him and doing his will. So we are not talking—when we talk about the world, we are not talking about an innocent or a neutral system. What we are is an evil system, a sinister system
that has an agenda. That’s what we are talking about. It takes several shapes or forms. It is a deceptive system that takes so many forms, but it has one purpose, oppose God and get people to do the same. So it is designed to turn people away in rebellion against God. And the fact of the matter is that all people in this world, by default, because we come from Adam, born as citizens of this kingdom under the influence of this system. All people are born as sinners who are influenced by the world, who love the world. That is a way that we are born into this world, but by God’s grace, by his intervention in our life, by his saving work through the Lord Jesus Christ and the gospel that has come to us with power, God has saved us, God has taken us from this kingdom and God has translated
us into the kingdom of his beloved son, done that work by His grace. So according to the way that we have considered, what does it mean to be worldly? To be worldly is to live under the influence of this system and to adopt its values and to really inculcate the mindsets that come with this system that essentially are displeasing to God and contrary to God’s will. And God calls us here not to love the world. He says don’t love it, don’t desire it, don’t come under its influence, do not pursue it, do not give it your allegiance. You—the world desires to have you in its grip, the world seeks to influence you, but do not give into it. Do not love the world. There’s a love that God hates. So we must not give
ourselves to the world. As we have considered this helpful and important to clarify what John is not saying here, just for the sake of clarity. John is not calling us here to hate or shun God’s created order. The material world that God has created is good, and it is to be rejoiced. The good gifts that God has given us in creation are to be rejoiced with thanksgiving. That is the command that God is, that is what God tells us, that is what God informs us in the Bible. And in fact, there will come people who make rules that we should not eat certain foods, we should not marry, we should not enjoy these good things that God has made for us in this world.
And in fact, Paul calls that demon doctrine, 1 Timothy chapter 4. So that is not what John is talking about here. And it is also important to recognize that John is obviously not calling us to hate the people in the world, the people in the world who are unbelievers. We must love the people whom God places in our life. We must love them. We must, uh, really seek to serve them. We must really seek to bring the gospel to them. We must, uh, we must not love them. We are to even show love to our enemies. That is the extent which God commands us. And we must ultimately point them to the Lord Jesus Christ. So
that’s not what John is talking about here. But we are to hate the system of the world, uh, that is opposed to God, and the values that it brings with it, and which is something we’re going to look at soon. That is what we are called to hate by John in this passage. Having considered this, we will move to the second point, the verdict. What happens? What is the, what is God’s evaluation, what is God’s assessment if we are found to be lovers of the world? John says, “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”
There are a couple of considerations we want to have before we look at this statement. So there are just a couple of things I want to mention that are important as we read through the epistle of John that help us read the epistle better. Otherwise we could be misled in understanding what John really means. The first thing we want to recognize is that John often talks in terms of lifestyle, as a broad lifestyle of an individual.
When he’s talking about loving the world here, he’s not talking about an instance or an act in our life. He’s talking about a pattern of life, a lifestyle. That’s what John has in mind. A trajectory of life, a direction of life. So it’s something like you can think of…
Okay, my PPT formatting has gone off. But you see, that’s the word lifestyle there. That’s… Yeah, okay. Uh, but we have to, when we think about what John is doing, think about zooming out of your life and looking at the broad direction of your life. We’re not zooming in and looking at a given instance or a given incident of your life, but what we are looking out is the direction, the overall course of your life. So that’s what, when John says “if anyone loves the world,” that’s what he means. Someone has a lifestyle direction that is showing a pattern, a consistent unbreakable pattern of is really addressing here.
The second important thing that we want to keep in mind is that this statement is not a cause and effect statement, in the sense that John is not saying that if someone loves the world, as a result, as a consequence, the love of the Father is not in him. That’s not what John is saying here. What this rather is, is an evidence and an inference. Or in other words, what John is doing here is he’s looking at the way of life of an individual, and he’s assessing what is the underlying reality in that individual. That’s what John is doing here, and that’s important, that’s very important
when we read the epistle of John, because John does that in multiple verses. We would, we could be misled in our thinking if we think that this is really a cause and effect statement. Just to, just to make this clear, so again badly formatted, but you see, evidence and inference. So loving the world is the evidence.
Loving the world is the evidence. And when someone lives that kind of a lifestyle, what we can infer about the underlying reality of that person is that the love of the Father is not in that person. If we just go back to 1 John 2, verse 3, it’s a little more clear to maybe see that there. It says, just to show that this is the way that John writes often, we have to assess each verse for what it is, but this is just a pattern of John’s writing. 1 John 2, 3, “And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments.”
So what John is really saying is that how do we know that we have a true saving relationship, a relational knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ? Or in other words, how do you know you’re Christian? You know this if you keep the commandments. So the lifestyle of keeping the commandments of the Lord Jesus Christ is what evidences the inward reality. You can infer from that there is a true knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ in that person’s life. That’s what John is saying. So that’s the sense in which John is speaking here. So we are dealing with the same thing here. “If anyone loves the world” is the lifestyle, it is the evidence, it’s the outward evidence, the course of a person’s life trajectory, what do we recognize?
This is the underlying reality of that person. This is the person’s heart condition. The love of the Father is not in him. So having said that, we want to just look at what, we just want to briefly park on the phrase, “the love of the Father.” We will just take that for a second. In the original, this phrase could go either way in the sense that it could mean the Father’s love for us or it could mean our love for the Father. Both are an option, both are possible in the Greek. So it’s really the context that must guide us to understand what sense is John giving here.
Because two opposing loves are being portrayed here, one is a love for the world and one is a love for the Father, it is possible that John is saying here that if someone loves the world, in that person. It’s a possibility. It’s a reasonable possibility that John means that. At the same time it is also helpful to just make the observation that when John is using love in the first half, it is a verb. It’s an action of loving but whereas when we come to the second half it’s a noun. It is that love which the Father… it seems like it’s that love which the Father possesses, that of which he’s the source and which he dispenses, right?
So it is reasonable to think because of this transition, John could have said if anyone loves the world, he does not love the Father. He could have used verbs in both places. That would be a more probably reasonable construction. Again, I do not know that much Greek to figure that out. But what can be said is this transition does give us a direction of thinking which leads us to this, that it is possibly talking about the love of the Father, what the Father, the love that the Father has for us. But I don’t think we need to worry so much about it. I
make. I just bring out this distinction to also bring out one more important thing in the God, in the epistle of John, in John’s theology. As John brings out truth, he makes it very clear when the love of the Father operates in a person, the love, the love is initiated. God is love and love is initiated from him. But when his love is initiated and his work takes effect in a person, when his love acts savingly in a person, it transforms the person to produce a true love for him. So a love from God produces a love for God, so that they are
really inseparable realities. One cannot really happen without the— If God loves an individual, he will change, take away his heart of stone, give him a heart of flesh, a heart that now rightly sees who God is and responds rightly to who God is. That is definitely the way John writes in other passages.
So I don’t think these are necessarily inseparable. These are ideas that are separate. But maybe the primary emphasis over here that John has is that the Father’s love for us. That is probably what John primarily has in mind. So, what is John really saying here? The habitual lifestyle of loving the world, what does it indicate about the true inward condition or the true inward reality of a given individual?
God’s saving love is not present in that individual and he does not truly love God. That’s a very sobering thing that John is telling us here, right? If someone is given to a direction of life where they love the world, the whole trajectory of their life is defined by the world, their whole mindset is shaped by the world, and there is no evidence, there is no holy struggle in their heart against the world.
If their life is shaped by the world and what the pleasures that it offers, well, that person may have a form of religion, that person may be able to articulate theology. But if this is the direction of life of a given individual, God’s saving love is not at work, has not worked in that person. Or in other words, to make it plain and simple, that person is not a Christian. And that’s a, an important dealing with this in the entire epistle. So John is making a very categorical statement here, right? He is telling us that he’s making two categories, Christian and non-Christian.
A Christian is one who is characterized by a love for God and a non-Christian is one who’s characterized by a love for the world. And categorically, if someone finds themselves in a way of life that is in love with the world and enjoying the world and does not show evidence of true love from his very inner person toward God, that person is not a Christian. Whatever form of religion, whatever church, whatever background, whatever theology does not matter, it evidences very clearly that person is not a Christian. So John is making a categorical statement, but we can also, as Christians, I think we can also see some degree of, I mean, we can learn something relatively speaking.
Let's come into the box of only Christians right now. If we come to that box, we are not considering the box of non-Christians. Relatively speaking, what we want to also see is that to the degree that we are influenced by the world and we cave in to the temptations and the pleasures that the world offers, it really directly affects our love for God. These are incompatible loves. These are mutually exclusive loves. They do not go together.
So, love for the world and love for the Father do not in any way come together. So, it is really important for us to recognize that if we allow the world to influence us, it will inevitably affect our love for the Father and our sense of the Father's love for us too. The love of the Father for us, of course, is always a constant. It is based solely on the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
don't sense that always the way that we should, right? Yeah. Okay, having considered these, so this is the verdict that John gives us. If anyone loves the world, he's not a Christian. That's the categorical verdict that John gives us. Having considered that, we will go now to the reasons that John gives us about why we should not love the world. He says, “For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life is not from the Father, but it's from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, and whoever does the will of God abides forever.” So John
is giving us here two reasons why we must not love the world. The first reason is that the things that consist and the things in the world do not originate from the Father. The Father is not the source of those things. And the second thing is the world is passing away, it is transient, it is a temporal thing. This all the pleasures everything away, but the doer of God's will have eternal life. That is what John tells us. So we'll consider the first reason that John gives us. So John goes on to tell us that there are three deadly forces at work in this
worldly system, what we call the world. There are three deadly forces that are employed by the enemy to really allure us, to tempt us, to lure us in, and to entice us. And it is by these forces that people are kept captive under the system. It is by these deceptive forces that people are held in the system. It's a very attractive, it's a very tempting system, but that is what Satan uses to deceive and hold people captive. And those three forces are the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. The word lust is essentially the word passion.
It's not always talking about a sexual desire. It is often used that way. It's not always talking about that. It's just talking about a desire. It could be used in a positive way as well. But here, clearly, it's a negative usage of the word. But it's more broad than sexual desire. It's a more broad use of the word. So it's a passion that is negative or evil. So the lusts of the flesh are those desires that arise from our fallen human nature apart from the influence of God, apart from God's sanctifying work. So it could be a broad range of sinful desires like lust or gluttony or various kinds of addictions or envy, jealousy, hatred.
I mean, it could express itself in so many ways. These are passions that are produced by the flesh and are really appealing to fallen man. The lust of the eyes are talking about those desires which are produced in us by what we see. We set our eyes on something, it seems very attractive to us, our hearts are captivated by it and we really want it, we crave for what we see. A covetousness is birthed in us because of what we see. That's what the lust of the eyes is referring to.
someone of the opposite gender, it could happen when seeing some material possession, something attractive, it could, that sense of covetousness which is created in our heart, that's what it's referring to. And the pride of life is referring to an exalted sense of self-importance that someone can have based on what they have been given by God. Some possession that they have, it could be some position that they have, some kind of prestigious thing that they have, maybe some skill or some ability that they possess, but it leads them to be puffed up, it leads them to a sense of self-importance, it leads them to focus on themselves and
lift themselves up because of what they have been given by God. That is what the pride of life is. So what one important observation that we can make over here is to see that the first two are desires and the third is an attitude. Or in other words, all the things that are being mentioned as far as the things that consist the world are mentioned have to do with our heart and will really result, I mean how do we evaluate it has to do with our inner person, it has to do with our heart, it has to do with our motivations and things like that. So we are really missing the point if we evaluate this thing called worldliness, if this idea called worldliness, if
we are only evaluating it based on somebody's external action, based on their behavior, we are really missing the point. Worldliness is something much more deeper than that. It is not a surface issue, it's a very deep heart issue. That's what we are really considering. So we really miss spotting worldliness if we do not go deeper into the heart and its motivations and its intentions.
Moreover, this list that John gives us here, I don't think that they are random. It very clearly echoes something from the creation narrative, right? When we look at… Okay, the formatting is bad and the colors are also bad, but please just, I think these are familiar passages, so hopefully they're good.
But consider what is said in Genesis 3:6. “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food” — something to do with the flesh, some desire, a bodily need — “and that it was a delight to the eyes,” something to be seen, something that saw and it provoked something in her, “and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise,” some, it would allow her to have a sense of self-importance, “she took the fruit and she ate.” So it looks like John is probably getting these three cat, these three principal forces probably from this passage. It's likely that he's getting it from there. So if he's doing that, what he's really
telling us is that this is the age-old way in which the enemy has tempted people. This is from the beginning. This is the way from the garden. This is the way the enemy has attacked humanity and drawn them away from the Lord. This is the way he has lured them and ensnared them and kept them captive under, to do his will. All, so John's, what John is telling us here, all these things do not, is not from the Father but is from the world. The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life are not from the Father but it's from the world.
So what he's telling us is that all these allurements, all these attractions do not come from the hand of our Father who's loving. It is not coming forth from the God who is love, but it comes from the world and it comes from the evil one. It does not come for your benefit. It does not come to do you good. It comes to destroy you. It comes to, it has a promise of something good. It seems to offer something nice, something attractive, something that will last, but it comes to destroy. It comes to take you. Right? So it seems like John is telling us, when these forces come to you, when these
principal forces seem to have some form of attraction in your life, remember the garden. Remember the garden and remember what happened in the fall. These things appeared so lovely, so beautiful, so attractive, but think of the destruction that it has left in its wake. A humanity that was separated from God. Because of that one temptation, think of what has followed after it. It is only destruction. The fall of the whole humankind, its corruption, its brokenness, even the brokenness of God's good creation, everything resulted from these forces that were presented and chosen by our father, our first father. So why John is telling us this is to really encourage us. He has given us a reason not to love the
world. This is not a good thing. Loving the world is destructive. It destroys you. It is not coming from the Father who is love. There is nothing it has to offer, does not deliver, does not really give you life. So do not love the world. John really wants us to be encouraged and God really wants us to see that there is no good. True goodness comes from knowing him and relating with him. So do not love the world. The second reason that John gives us is that the world is transient. “The world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.”
So, John is telling us that the world is passing away. It means that the world and its desires are coming to an end. And John has used this phrase just a few verses previously in chapter 2, verse 8, when he says that “the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining.” He's referencing that the Lord Jesus Christ has come and because of that the darkness is passing away.
So because the Lord Jesus Christ has come and he has decisively defeated Satan on the cross and he's defeated, the world stands judged on the cross. That's what John 12 teaches us. And because of that, the end of the world is settled. The world is really, it has, it's set on a timer, right? It is coming to an end. It is not going to last forever. It is only a matter of time. It is only a matter of time when God's purposes are being unfolded and the world will fully and finally pass away. God is actively taking history to a place where this world order which is in rebellion against God will be judged and it will be put to an end.
The world is passing away. But in contrast, the one who does the will of God abides forever. So the Christian is being described here as the one, the doer of God's will, the one who does the will of God. That's the way the Christian is being described here. So instead of giving himself to the desires of this world, the Christian's overall life direction is really governed by this one factor. What does my God want me to do? What is my God's will? That is what sets the course and the trajectory of the Christian's life.
So this is what John tells us, right? If you love the world and pursue the things in the world, remember the end to which it is going. All your investment, all the time that you spend on loving the world and giving yourself to the pleasures of the world, it is going to pass away. It does not have any returns. In fact, it fires back. But the doer of God's will abide forever, and all the benefits of his doing of God's will be, will be carried on into eternity, and he will receive the reward for his work. So John is calling us to focus and invest on that which is lasting.
So when temptation to worldliness comes, when temptation comes to give in to worldliness, we must remind ourselves that the world is passing away and all its desires. But if you pursue God and his will, it is going to last forever. It is of lasting value and benefit for you. That is John’s argument to us.
Having considered that, we’ll just quickly look at a few applications. Just quickly we’ll run through. We’re just going to reiterate some things that we have considered. The first is recognize the imminent danger of worldliness in your life. We must be aware that whoever you are, starting from your pastor down to the smallest child, worldliness seeks to have you. Worldliness will come after you. It takes different shapes and forms of course. It comes in different shapes to each person. Satan is deceptive. He’s really cunning. So it will present itself differently. But we must recognize that no one in any sphere of life is exempt from temptation to worldliness.
Everyone sitting here in this room, everyone, I include myself, all of us are really prone to temptations to worldliness. We are not exempt from it. It is a threat that is ever present in our life till we meet with Christ. It can look like a young man who is given to laziness and who skips the meetings of the church and who does not want to attend Bible studies. He is lax and lazy. Or maybe he is given to hanging out with his friends and neglecting the things of God. It can look like a child who is never satisfied with the toys that he has.
that new toy that his friend has. It can look like a young lady who’s obsessed with her looks and who’s so focused on what others are thinking about her. It can look like a man who never finds contentment in the salary that God has given him. And he’s always obsessed with that next hike that is going to come.
It can look like a mother who’s so caught up with this thing that my child should score more than the neighbor’s kid. Like I really want to look better than that family. My child. It can really look like a man who’s preaching or a man who’s serving to lift himself up, to bring attention to himself rather than giving attention and pointing people to God. Worldliness can take so many forms and sometimes it even takes, it wears on some Christian clothing and comes to us. It can just take a whole range of, it can just present itself in so many ways so we must be careful.
all of us are prone to this threat of worldliness. So our ambitions, our aspirations, our plans, our decisions, our priorities, our habits, our hobbies, our values, everything can be affected by worldliness. Everything is under threat. So we must recognize that worldliness is not a problem for those people out there, those really wicked people who don’t know God. No, it’s a problem for us. It’s an ever-present problem for each of us. So we must be sensitive to that reality. Recognize that reality. But we must, like John has exhorted us, we must reject it because it is a love that God hates.
The second thing that we want to just consider is that we must reflect on our motivations and not just our actions. To detect and weed out worldliness, we do not want to be people who are always thinking only about our external acts, the acts that, the things that we do. If that is the way that we assess our life and how we are, how we are responding rightly to God, we will not often be able to sense, detect worldliness when it really comes. We must be people who ask questions about what motivates us. What are our intentions? What is leading me to do what I do? That is an important thing. As a Christian, we want to be people who search the heart, who lay our
heart bare before God and say, “Lord, show me the hidden things in my heart. Help me see the true state of my heart. If I am responding rightly to you from my heart.” Our outside can impress people. The things that we do, the acts that we do can impress people. But God sees our heart. Of course, our outside is important. God evaluates us from the inside to the out. All of it. Our intentions, our motivations, our acts, our words, everything is evaluated by God. But we do not want to be people like, we do not want to be people who are really assessing only the outward actions that we do. The Pharisees did that. We do not want to be people like that. So even in the life of the church, when, often in the life of
the church we come across situations where we must probably issue a correction to one another. I think it would serve us well if we would ask. Now, there are some things that we do that are overtly wrong, that are clearly in the wrong. We can address that. But when there are things that are questionable, when we are really questioning, was that really a good choice? Was that someone just indulging in something, something that’s questionable that probably typically falls in the area of Christian liberty?
We not just want to deal with the what’s. What did you do? We want to deal with the why’s. Why did you do that? I think that’s a good way of discipling people. Engage with the heart. You want to get to the heart of why people do what they do. That’s a way that we can encourage one another to think. So going back to my uncle, I think it would have been a good discipling moment if he had asked me why I was wearing the goatee. If I was wearing it to puff myself up and show that, wow, I got a goatee or whatever.
If that was my motivation, that was a good discipling moment. That was a good thing to ask. Something as small as that also can be addressed. That's fair. That's okay. But I think the error, the reason I pointed that out is, I think the error was that he stopped at the surface, right? He just asked, he just dealt with the what. He didn't deal with the why. And that is not often helpful. We could misunderstand people and we could come to wrong assessments about why they do what they do.
The third thing we want to just consider is that we want to be people who root ourselves in the scriptures and are devoted to obedience. We want to be people who grow in our knowledge of God's revealed will for us. So even as we talk about this matter of worldliness, we recognize that there are just so many ways, a thousand ways in which worldliness can present itself to each of us in each of our lives.
How are we going to detect it? How are we going to understand what is worldliness and what is not? I think it is by really giving ourselves to God's word, it is by recognizing what is God's world, by really shaping our mind and our thoughts according to God's revealed will. When we are people who are able to increasingly know what is God's heart about a given matter, we are able to detect what is error, what is coming from the world that is not in step with what how God thinks about a matter. Just think about how dealt with the devil. And I think there is a correspondence to that too in what John is saying here. I mean, there's some echo of that perhaps. Jesus also was presented with food and the temptation to change stone to become bread, which could be loosely connected to the
desire of the flesh, and he was shown the kingdoms of the world, he was seeing the glory of the kingdoms in the world, a desire for the eyes. And he was lifted up to the temple and told to throw himself a spectacular event where, you know, it would be like a glorious event where everyone would come to him and say, wow, Messiah and all of that. So there was a temptation to be self-exalted. But what did Jesus respond to the enemy? He said, “It is written, it is written, it is written.” He knew God's revealed will and he used that sword to defeat the enemy.
It was by the revealed will of God, by the revealed word of God that Christ defeated the enemy. And that is precisely what Adam and Eve failed to do. They disregarded the word of God while Christ, he knew the will of God and he submitted himself to it by faith. And we must be people who follow the example of the second Adam and not the first in really waging war against this thing called worldliness in our life.
The last application that I just want us to look together is that we must reject the temptations to love the world which rival our love for God. Typically when we start the new year or often when we think about ourselves we really want to experience more of God's love in our life. We really want to be people who grow in our love for God. That's a desire as Christians. God has given us that desire. God has recreated our hearts to give us a desire for Him. And that's a good desire. That's a wonderful desire.
But what we have just considered is that a love for the world is mutually exclusive with a love for the Father. So we are talking again in the relative sense about Christians. We specifically. So we want to once again remind ourselves that when we give in to the pull of the world, if we entertain the lusts of the world in our life, it will inevitably affect our love for our God, for our Father.
If we want to really pursue a deep and growing knowledge of who our God is, we want to grow in relational intimacy with our God, it is not an option to fight worldliness. We must fight worldliness. We must seek to reject worldliness. I'll just read a quote from John Piper. He says, “If we don't feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because we have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because we have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Our soul is stuffed with small things and there is no room for the great.”
So why are often our hearts dull toward God? Why are we not able to love God as we should? Often it's because something else is occupying our heart. The world has taken its seat in our heart. We have entertained the world. We have let the world have its foothold in our lives. And that really extinguishes or, you know, in so many ways it really diminishes our love for our Father. So if we are really seeking to grow in love for our God and relationship with our God, we might have to cut off and we might have to deal with and reject worldliness that
we see in our life. We want to evaluate our lives, we want to see what is the kind of threat that is there in our life, and we want to cut that off because what is at stake here is our relationship with our God, our love for our God and our sense of our God's love for us. That is what is at stake if we do not, if we entertain worldliness in our lives. So we have considered that God calls us in this passage to not love the world. We are people whom God by His grace has saved from the world. That is what God has saved us from. He saved us out of the world because the world was destructive, it was opposed to God and
It was a system that was terrible. It was against God, and it was terrible for us as well, and God saved us from it. So we do not want to be people who go back to what we have been saved from, what we have been taken out of. We must strive to wage war against that which we have been saved from by God’s grace. The world is going to come at us in every direction. It really seeks to have our love. It seeks to have our devotion, our attention, our allegiance, but we must not give it. We must not be like our first father Adam.
We must be like the Lord Jesus Christ, who the great and the true and better Adam, who conquered the enemy and who set, who went ahead and established our relationship with God, and was also set the way that we ought to pursue God’s will as the true human and the new humanity that God has made. So we must follow Christ in overcoming the world. So what John tells us is that the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, these are attractive, they are tempting, they have a promise of life, but they are destructive, they do not come
from the Father, they are going to destroy you, so do not love the world, and John also tells us the world is passing away, and God is bringing the world to an end, and the one who does, the will of God remains forever, ever. So therefore do not love the world. There’s a love that God hates, so we must not love the world. We’ll say what a parent conclude. Father, we thank you for helping us consider your word. Father, please help us to humbly search our hearts and see, Lord, in what ways the world is tempting us, in what ways the world is seeking
to have us. And please give grace to me and all my dear brothers and sisters here. Oh Lord, that we may not love the world, that we may love you, that we may devote ourselves wholly to you. Lord, you are worthy. We thank you for Christ who came and laid down his life for us. Thank you that he has done the work that is necessary for redeeming our broken hearts, our fallen persons. Lord, thank you for what he has done.
also that he has set for us. We pray that we will follow him in our pursuit of defeating worldliness. Give us your grace, we pray, Lord. Pray for each one of us. Help us apply these things and show us specific things, particular areas in each of our lives where we need to change. We pray for your help and your clarity to be given to us. Lord, please give us your grace. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.